From ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY and the “biology, chemistry and physics aren’t climate” department comes this oh-so-whiny study that complains there’s not enough brainwashing materials in hard science textbooks. The reason there’s so little is that climate isn’t relevant to these subjects at the introductory level. Sheesh. What a waste of grant money.

Study finds very few pages devoted to climate change in introductory science textbooks

Less than 2 percent of pages discussed climate change in leading biology, chemistry and physics textbooks

As an ASU graduate student, Rachel Yoho wanted to push the boundaries of renewable energy research. What she didn’t fully anticipate is that it would also lead her to questioning how climate change is taught in today’s universities.

In the Biodesign Center for Environmental Biotechnology, led by director and ASU Regents’ Professor (and recent Stockholm Water Prize winner) Bruce Rittmann, she found a welcome home to make her research thrive.

There, she focused on microbes that were giving the renewable energy field a literal jolt. For her dissertation work, led under the guidance of mentor César Torres, she published several groundbreaking papers on advances in microbial fuel cells, which turn waste into electricity through a bacterial biofilm that has the ability to grow and thrive on an electrode.

“They breathe the metal, and give us electrons for energy in the process,” said Yoho.

But while pursuing her Ph.D., she also became interested in the art of teaching science and earned a certificate in scientific teaching in higher education.

While pursuing graduate studies in the lab of Cesar Torres (left), Rachel Yoho worked with Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology director Bruce Rittmann to explore how climate change and related topics were covered in leading introductory science textbooks. CREDIT Rachel Yoho

Among the most polarizing issues encountered in science and society today is the topic of global climate change. Despite nearly universal scientific consensus that it is indeed real and caused by us, the American public and politicians continue to be skeptical of the science.

She was inspired by her science education courses to ask research questions that reflected the interdisciplinary nature of her lab-based research in the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at ASU’s Biodesign Institute. So, when she started examining the topic of climate change in introductory science courses by pouring over introductory science textbooks, Yoho was surprised by the paucity of materials devoted toward subjects like global warming, climate change and renewable energy applications.

“In a cutting-edge research lab, we are used to looking at things across disciplines,” said Yoho, who now performs research and teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “Within the educational environment, I wanted to see how different disciplines approach topics, and so, we looked at the terminology and content of textbooks, which are likely the most well-established and well-respected first or second stops for information in undergraduate education.”

The introductory textbooks were also chosen because they “represent the intersection of teaching to non-scientists (popularization of science) and training for future scientists.”

Now, in new research published in the journal Environmental Communication, Yoho and co-author Rittmann examined more than the 15,000 combined pages from current editions of 16 of the leading physics, biology and chemistry undergraduate textbooks published between 2013 and 2015.

They found that less than 4 percent of pages were devoted toward discussing climate change, global warming, related environmental issues or renewable energy applications.

In addition, the research team found:

While they observed a large variation for individual books, biology textbooks had on average the largest number of pages discussing the effects of climate change, but still less than 2 percent, while chemistry textbooks showed the largest variation, and physics books have an average of less than 0.5 percent of total pages;

The greatest content is in the final third of the book for biology and chemistry, which supports a general trend in education in that “applications” usually are addressed towards the end of a course of study, building on a firm foundation of content knowledge;

Among the three disciplines, the least emphasis was placed on renewable energy technologies in the biology textbooks examined. Characteristically, alternative fuels and other technologies related to the transportation sector are emphasized heavily in chemistry and physics;

Nuclear energy, which was addressed separately, is found on less than 1 percent of textbook pages and unfavorably represented.

“The terms we included were not just limited to a keyword search, but also involved going page by page through each of the textbooks. We looked for related topics like any applications and discoveries related to fossil fuels, and renewable energy technologies like wind and solar,” said Yoho.

They noted that climate change, global warming, fossil fuels, renewable energy, and nuclear energy are not often a focus of the textbooks or course for these disciplines. Furthermore, these topics may not even be the focus of a single unit in one of these courses and are unlikely to be a primary factor in the selection of the course textbook.

However, these cross-cutting topics of socio-scientific debate represent important societal and environmental contexts for developing informed and productive citizens.

“The discussion within these traditional, compartmentalized science disciplines has implications on introductory-level science education, the public perception of science, and an informed citizenship,” said Rittmann.

Going forward, they think perhaps it’s time for introductory sciences to be more explicit about some of these pressing topics that span multiple disciplines.

“It’s a difficult balance in an introductory course,” said Yoho. “There’s so much information to cover in a short time. However, our students are facing these issues inside and outside of the classrooms. Our communities feel the impacts of our energy decisions and climate.” Some discussion can go a long way towards preparing students. “A next step might be to focus on the terms and content we discuss, as well as the potential role of these topics in introductory education,” she added.

“However, no single discipline can tackle this alone,” wrote Yoho in the paper. “While the traditional disciplinary lines influence specific discussions, the overall trends reveal a relatively small percentage of pages allotted to the topics related to energy technologies, climate change, and related environmental issues across the disciplines.”

By documenting that large textbooks devote relatively few pages to these pressing societal issues, this research calls into question the effectiveness of the information provided to students in introductory materials.

and to get laid as often as possible ( sorry grrls but young males uni students think like that…)

It is kind sad though that undergraduate lectures and tutorials are not just like being in “a cutting edge research lab” or is what they mean that “a cutting edge research lab” should be just like undergraduate lectures and tutorials between bong hits where you can get laid in the store/cool room/sample locker if you are on song.

kKomrade Kuma , many bioscience departments also have a ‘communal’ microscopy-dark room where the occupants frequently have reason to lock the door while they inside, especially when there are two people involved….

Exactly, Jacob. I personally knew fellow grad-students who weren’t really into the topic of their PhD. Some of them then developed an excessive ‘love of teaching’ and wider interests that were very tangential to science and more applicable to politics and the humanities. Of course they still got to be co-authors on their supervisor’s work and put it on their CV.

I wonder given the modern slant applied to education whether she would have been similarly disappointed by the text books lack of information about iphones, Google, “fake news” and the Kardashians – surely such immensely important topics should be covered in all facets of education these days.. /sarc

Me – I’d be teaching my students were I still lecturing about critical thinking, rhetoric, falsification and the philosophy of science – and continuing to award students extra marks if they can demonstrate anything I taught them was wrong (something other lecturers hated me doing!).

no one ever claimed any extra marks, but it DID encourage them to study the subjects for real beyond the stuff taught in the books, and it surprised them the number of times they found the stuff I taught was more accurate than some of the subject material treated as right in books (that wasn’t)

Among the most polarizing issues encountered in science and society today is the topic of global climate change. Despite nearly universal scientific consensus that it is indeed real and caused by us, the American public and politicians continue to be skeptical of the science.

The solution isn’t to kill any shred of your credibility by trying to brainwash the students. We’re already seeing a backlash against experts in general but also against colleges. link

It’s time for academicians to get out of their ivory towers (the original echo chambers) and see what the rest of the population sees only too clearly.

There are subjects in meteorology and geo-science about paleo-climatology and paleo-environmental studies, along with suitable texts, peer-reviewed journals, and hundreds of lectures.

So why should Chemistry, of all subjects, be teaching AGW greenhouse-effect propaganda dirges to their students?

The fact is, the courses and proper texts are available to whoever wants to study those subjects, as electives, or as part of their discipline, if they feel that knowledge avenue is relevant to them and their profesional needs.

The students PAY for their degrees and books, they FREELY choose ti take their subjects, VOLUNTARILY, so if they deliberately choose not to do any ‘climate courses’, or to not buy any ‘climate’ related texts, then that’s 100% up to THEM.

It is NOT someone else’s business. Freedom of speach necessarily means freedom to choose what to invest their life, time or money into, to learn or study.

Ideological dictators can just get stuffed. The freakin’ nerve of these over-reaching greenie-nuts.

Not if it is oxidized metal. Most metals in nature are oxidized. It takes industrial processes where the metals are refined back to base metals (oxidation state 0). The energy used to produce those metal electrodes is far more than any meager electron flow from bacterial oxidation.

Or in the case of black smokers on the deep sea beds. The smokers are emitting hot reduced sulfur. The microbes oxidize the sulfur to get it to release electrons. Bacteria grows. Worms eat the bacteria in a symbiosis. The sulfur was reduced by the intense heat from deep mantle heating.

On a side note, a week ago I bought a copy of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics for my birthday, and have been thoroughly enjoying it. It is awesome! I highly recommend it to you math enthusiasts out there. Expect many many hours of fun and insight.

“Climate Literacy” means “Climate Indoctrination”. Studies have found that skeptics of catastrophic man-made “climate change” are more scientifically literate than those who regurgitate the Party Line out of ignorance.

The great danger of applying the principle of ‘Independent Investigation of Truth’ is that people will develop the skills to find it.

Facilitated manipulation (“facipulation”) is not a form of education. Similarly, there is a fundamental difference between education and schooling. Being schooled in global warming is not the same as being educated about the topic.

Being facipulated to predetermined conclusions articulated decades before any evidence had been or could be produced is indoctrination, plain and simple.

There problem is much of climate science can’t actually be taught as science because it breaks all the central tenets. Even biology which has been going thru a process to try and move to a harder science discipline would struggle to include much of climate science.

Climate Science in it’s current form could only be classed with social sciences like medical studies. They even resemble each other with the continual stupid announcements based around half cocked data. Even within medicine there is currently a big push for science-based medicine and move it to a harder science based discipline.

I always loved Rudolf Virchow’s quote
“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.”

U.K. school textbooks contain pages of climate change caused by human activity hogwash and far too many teachers are only too happy to preach this unsubstantiated drivel as if it was settled science. Most notably it is featured in religious studies secondary school textbooks – at least it is in the right subject area here – but is linked up with stewardship of the planet in an entirely uncritical way. Evil humans killing polar bears with CO2 blah blah blah. Two per cent I wish.
The wonder is that so many young people manage to resist this brainwashing.

In general, young people are not stupid. They grow up in a milieu of sophisticated blaring messages trying to sell them something, including political, economic and environmental tripe. They are much more able to discern B.S. than we oldsters were at equivalent ages.

I would like to see a breakdown of what else is covered in these textbooks. I suspect that most people would end up supporting dropping that 2% and parceling out the pages to other topics. I am also more concerned that so little is included about nuclear, and that it is negative.

Textbooks are already expensive, and “updated” more frequently than needed. Every person on the planet knows the whole thing is a racket. Demanding that textbooks be (needlessly) further overhauled and constantly updated will just increase prices even more. Let’s be real, most students never read the whole thing, and some do not read it at all.

When I was in high school, a teacher told my class how a new textbook had been selected. Rather than look for the most effective, best written text, the school went through several options page by page, counting how many pictures of “diverse” people (apparently people in wheelchairs were particularly desirable) there were in each book. They also wanted pictures of people using computers.

This was for a German language textbook.

Meanwhile, according to our books, there were still two Germanys. In 1997. The school was worrying about having enough pictures of non-ethnic Germans in wheelchairs using laptops, apparently unconcerned by the fact that the students were stuck reading about die Deutsche Demokratische Republik that had not existed for 7 years. Did I mention that we had the largest German language program in the county, and that our county was in the top five wealthiest counties in the U.S.?

As a retirement present I’ve been auditing physics and chemistry classes at Chico State. All the texts I’ve perused have a section on AGW. I assume no text gets purchased without it. The professors I’ve asked support AGW. The students I’ve asked have been told their whole lives about AGW and are shocked that I’m a skeptic. No buildings go up that are not sustainable (whatever that means). But I’m not looking for a fight. I tell the kids to get good jobs and pay a lot of Social Security.

Very intelligent course, Jim. Once the students enter the workforce and see what the greenies and politicians are doing to their paychecks, attitudes change. Especially when they don’t see any climate change; there are only so many storms, floods, droughts, etc that are “historic/unprecedented.”

Yoho et al were probably correct to whine about the lack of teaching about nuclear energy and fossil fuels, which are the two currently available energy sources with the highest energy density.

But maybe the writers of introductory college textbooks on chemistry, physics, and biology don’t want to get involved in political debates, and want to only present undisputed scientific facts that are useful to their students.

If some of these students go on to get engineering degrees and study thermodynamics, they will find out that certain compounds (like those found in petroleum, natural gas, and coal) release a relatively large amount of energy when reacted with oxygen, and can draw their own conclusions about what to do with them.

I wonder how many of those textbooks said anything about Scientific Method? Nope, this is just another planning event on how to best to tweak the propaganda. Like Obama they believe they just aren’t writing enough, talking enough or in just the right way. IF they only talked more and in just the right way there would be 90% consensus in the real world, NOT!

If they add ANY pages about CAGW to a standard Intro to Physics text book, I will burn every copy I get my hands on. It has no business being included in the kinetics section, the dynamics section, the electromagnetic section, the rotational dynamics section – it might include a sentence in the thermal physics chapter since almost no freshman physics classes make it that far in the text, but even that should be to mock it.

I guess it could be included in a philosophy of science textbook as the counter-example to avoid at all costs – after they have very clearly pounded in the rules of the scientific method!!!

Why are they so shy? Own it. It’s Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Cooling.. Warming… Climate Disruption… Change. It’s as if they are hedging their bets. A behavior that is prototypical of the chaos that confines mortal beings to the limited scientific logical domain.

If a high percentage of these textbooks discussed climate change, the study would have used it as evidence that the scientific community takes it seriously, i.e., another attempt at indicating “scientific consensus.”

Are you kidding! Those are the cornerstones of white privilege graduate programs. Those texts would be two feet thick, but they don’t print them because of … well … that would manifest white privilege … and deforestation … plus they can’t read …

Ah! Now you’ve hit on the neuron mass problem… It would appear that human neuron masses are not so different from Skinner’s pigeon neuron masses.

The Church of Global Warming needs to indoctrinate young minds to succeed, just like all other religions and other virulent viruses… because young neuron masses are good at pattern matching and associating meaning to a pattern.

The question remains, “Will humans ultimately realize that supernatural forces do not exist, and that humans are an insignificant component of the universe and, in fact, an insignificant component of the tiny mote of dust we inhabit… or will we continue to view the Earth as the center of the universe and continue to see our image impressed into and onto every part of existence whether or not such claim is valid or provable?”

I really don’t know what all the fuss is all about. According to the news today over 80 percent of US High School kids can’t read at the level required to understand the content of such science books anyway.

Little “climate change in leading biology, chemistry and physics textbooks”. That’s because biology, chemistry and physics are sciences, whereas climate change is a religion or belief, with no true science involved.

I should also complain why the analytical solution to the Navier-Stokes equations is not found in climatology textbooks. I mean how can they predict climate change? The equations remain unsolvable. They use numerical solutions in supercomputers. Just a fancy word for trial and error where the error is growing over time because the system is chaotic.

If you really want to get into that discussion the proposed driver of climate change is a quantum process and it already tells you classical physics Navier-Stokes won’t fully hold, you end up in a debate about whether it is a good approximation and having to classify the media.

I bet Witten et al can write a string theory version of Madelung equations in 10 dimensions. Just don’t ask them to solve it. Neither Madelung nor Schrodinger nor Witten can solve even the classical Navier-Stokes equations. Perelman has been trying to solve it for 10 years but it’s harder than Poincare conjecture.

When I was in college, the population bomb was all the rage. My chemistry professor, who wrote the book we used, may have a little in his book (mayby half a page with a graph in a 600 page book) about the population explosion but in discussion on this timely topic in class, he was all in favor of his students having 3 or 4 kids because they were more likely to have smart kids who might change the world. In the 45 years or so since that class, we’ve gone from worrying about mass starvation to the growing problem of obesity while burning a substantial portion of the food we grow as transportation fuel.
I am also wondering why the emphasis on bio, chem and physics only. What about engineering and economics? The people who might actually create the solution to the alleged climate change issue will be engineers working within economic constraints. Could it be many of those engineers might be able to do the math and realize how absurd the simple academic solutions really are?

“Less than 2 percent of pages discussed climate change in leading biology, chemistry and physics textbooks”

No Sh*t Sherlock. Is that because they are biology, chemistry and physics textbooks? Subjects that might cover climate are anthropology, archaeology, geology, geography, paleontology and history, perhaps. In fairness to the complainant, biology might cover climate within zoology and botany. However, I would guess that a course in politics is where you would find the most pages on climate change.

Uh, catastrophic future climate change is predicated on computer models, Stephen. The hypothetical effects of a possibly warming world on the biosphere should acknowledge the uncertainties of such climate models by scientists making such extrapolations. To the extent they don’t, they are propaganda.

I want to know how much time they spent on climate basics in grade school.Since her expectations are for them to spend more time on climate change, I suspect her grade school science class spent time exclusively on climate change and none on climate basics.

I’m not sure the subject even belongs in freshman biology. I have a newer book around but the only handy one is from 1989, 8 pounds on the bathroom scale. The problem is that these have long been useful for prepping for a Ph.D. qualifying exam, having too much for freshman. This has resulted in non-major courses, some that too often teach agendas instead of science.

A quick perusal found 1412 pages, nothing really new in ecology, a little on meteorology and oceanography, plus appendices, glossary, and index. It might pay to put students into physics, chemistry and geology first. Or maybe historical approach. Lack of applications in current books is a good sign as these belong in advanced classes, weight not so much.

“Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at ASU’s Biodesign Institute.” What is that?

For the record I found a more recent (2002) biology text, no reduction in weight. The book is “BIOLOGY” by Eldra P. Solomon, Linda R. Berg and Diana W. Martin. Brooks/Cole (1254 pp. plus appendices and glossary). There are two and a half pages of reviewers. Most of it stays with usual exhaustive coverage, but there is a 19 page last chapter 55 (Humans in the Environment) with the following sections.

SPECIES ARE DISAPPEARING AT AN UNPRECEDENTED RATE
DEFORESTATION IS OCCURRING AT AN UNPRECEDENTED RATE
CERTAIN ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTANTS MAY AFFECT EARTH’S CLIMATE
STRATOSPHERIC OZONE CONTINUES TO DECLINE
ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS ARE INTERRELATED

These have subsections with emphasis on negative human effects, such as commercial activities.
They do acknowledge successes with endangered species and a few uncertainties. Fig. 55.10 is a graph showing increase in global temperature from mid 70s (~14.0 to ~14.4) to 2000, flat back to 1960. Fig. 55-2 is a poor (not college quality) sketch of “Enhanced Greenhouse Effect. ” LEARNING OBJECTIVES have at least six of ten that I would rate negative, the remainder mostly neutral. There is a reasonable one page section on Career Visions, Environmental Consultant.

Brief study indicates that this chapter is mostly biased and even worse, poor and incomplete science, much referenced to 2001 IPPC report. —- “The human influence on climate change can be identified despite questions about how much of the recent warming stems from natural variations…..;…. extreme weather events… have occurred with increasing frequency in certain regions…..; Almost all climate experts agree with the IPCC’s assessment that the warming trend has already befun and will continue throughout the 21st century. ” And the best for last—“Scientists around the world have been researching global warming (bold) for the past 50 years. As the evidence has accumulated, those most qualified to address the issue have reached a strong consensus that the 21st century will experience significant climate change and that human activities will be responsible for much of this change.”

Comparison with 2010+ texts would be interesting and more importantly how departments and instructors followed the texts. Also there were earlier texts covering similar applications, but I suspect with better science. This one appears better than environmental texts of the period, last chapter excepted. Proper analysis would require weeks of study.

(“We analyzed over 15,000 pages of introductory-level undergraduate Biology, Chemistry, and Physics textbooks to assess terminology and content related to these pressing environmental topics.”) That would be ten biology textbooks, maybe a few more if old ones included.